Social psychology homework III

They do not have access to clean water (they use sea water for almost everything, and sometimes “freshwater” from the swamp for the most important activities like cooking). Furthermore, the region floods every year, and at those times they lose all their belongings.
In this environment we worked for seven days. The level of motivation in the team was high with some exceptions (between particularly those members who did not think that improving the situation of those people were was possible, or our responsibility). This was an example of other psychological phenomena covered during this course –when people do not interpret these situations as problems, or do not feel responsible for what is happening there, or when we see others doing nothing to change it, it is probable that the bystander effect happens. 

That provoked conflict between some members of the group (to be honest between two of the psychologists of the group, who thought that their only responsibility was dealing with the “psychological problems” of the community, and myself, the other psychologist, who since the first day stopped waiting for “patients”, and worked as a dental assistant, optometrist assistant, doctor’s assistant, nurse, or just washing and sterilizing the dental instruments). I wish I could say that we used the “third side” or that we solved our problems in order to keep helping others… but that never happened. I quit as a psychologist for the majority of the trip, and worked in areas that I considered the priority (it is impossible to solve any “psychological” issue if you are struggling to survive).
During this experience I was able to verify the positive influence of others upon us. When the normative behavior was helping others, a chain reaction happened: we motivated one another to keep working, some days even more than 14 hours a day… and even the members of the group who did not want to get involved in activities different of from their area of expertise, helped others (several psychological principles can be applied to explain this situation, but just to mention some covered during the readings and lectures: conformity with the group, normative behavior, reciprocity norm, social responsibility norm, a general good mood, we were observing several hopeful models all day long, we had plenty of time to do it, etc.). A different source of motivation was to know that some people had to paddle canoes for hours to get where we they (?)could receive our help.